Sega

This untitled rock climbing game was once in development or to be published for the Sega Saturn by a rather obscure company named Netyou. The image you see in this page is the only remaining proof of its existence, it seems impossible to find any more details about the game or its developers. The screenshot was found by Yakumo in a japanese gaming magazine and posted in 2010 on the Assembler Games Forum. If you’ll ever find something more about this cancelled Saturn game, please let us know!

Kyskrew (also known as “Call Of Destiny“) is a cancelled RPG for Dreamcast and PC, originally meant to be released sometime in fall / winter of 2001. Even if the game seems to have been mostly a fan-project in early concept stage, it’s quite interesting to learn about it because before this article there were not many evidences about its existence online: for sure it’s one of the most forgotten unseen games planned for Sega Dreamcast.

The graphic shown in these early screenshots (published in various French magazines such as “Gameplay RPG” #31 in july/august 2001, “Dreamzone” #25 in June/July 2001 and “Joypad” #113 in November 2001) was good for its time, but most of the models and environments were pre-rendered and it’s currently unknown how much of the game was really in a playable state.

Kyskrew was in development by Dragonhydre (later renamed Crystal Dream), a small independent French team that was disbanded just after the cancellation of their project in mid 2002. It seems that Dragonhydre was composed of 12 members (with age ranging from 16 to 23 years-old) who meet in various French gaming forums and decided to organize a development team to create their own game.

In an interview published on Dream-Emu a former member of Dragonhydre said that their plan was to release the game for free on their website, to let people to download the ISO and play it on their Dreamcast and PC.

The plot of Kyskrew involved the Goddess of Love and Creation – Eloina – who imprisoned her arch-enemy, the God of Hate – Gainer. Unfortunately a fragment of Gainer’s tainted soul would escape from his prison and reincarnate in a human being to take revenge and destroy the world.

It seems Kyskrew would have featured different combat mechanics, they wanted to use real-time combat system to fight normal enemies through levels but then combat would became turn-based during boss fights. Several character classes were planned to play the game with, including knights, magicians, and thieves. There was also an internal clock system that alternated the game time between night and day, a feature that have since become a standard in many modern RPGs including Elder Scrolls and Fable.

The world of Kyskrew also appears to have been particularly large, with 5 continents that included a good number of cities and dungeons. It was reported by the project’s director that the game would have had over 40 hours of gameplay.

As the Dreamcast was near the end of its life-cycle, in late 2001 Dragonhydre decided to move the game to Playstation 2, plus adding a GBA version too. It’s hard to say how much work was really put into these consoles, as the team was soon disbanded.

In 2004 another former member of Dragonhydre wrote a few pots on the Yaronet forums, revealing that they had many internal problems: work done on the game was not very good, team members keep changing during development and even early deadlines continued to be postponed, until the cancellation of the project.

A few tech-demo videos were once available on their official website, but unfortunately it seems Archive.org doesn’t have the files anymore. If you know someone who worked on this game who could still have some footage saved, please let us know!

Article by Blake Lynch & monokoma, thanks to Isatis_Angel for the scans and contribution!

Cutie Poo is a cancelled action / platform game planned for Mega Drive and Amiga that was in development in 1990 by the legendary DMA Design team (Lemmings, GTA, Body Harvest), and it’s probably one of the lost games with the most bizarre titles ever. Cutie Poo was conceived from a character animation created by Gary Timmons just for fun and inspired by Disney cartoons and their smoothly animations: when David Jones (DMA founder) saw Gary’s animation he was so impressed that proposed him to develop a full game using that same character (named Bob).

“When Tony started on Cutiepoo, he and Gary sat down and came up with a simple game design. Basically, Cutiepoo (the main character), was trying to save little furry Tribbles (as inspired by startrek), from a character called Doc. Mallet.

This was the days of simple games, and true to this mantra, Dr. Mallet ran about trying to kill the tribble by squishing them with a huge mallet. This all took place inside a chocolate factory – for some reason.

Gary was now trying to get levels together for Cutiepoo, and had drawn the first in a series of test backgrounds. He, Tony and Dave then sat down to decide which style to use. The winner turner out to be the chocolate factory, since they could all see some funny situations cropping up in here.”

It seems that the main objective of the game was to guide Bob through the levels and find the exit as fast as possible, while avoiding traps and trying to save as many Tribbles as possible. Tribbles would also move around the levels and could die in traps or be killed by Doc. Mallet.

Unfortunately Gary’s fluid animations became a pain to code into the game and after a year of development Tony didn’t make enough progress, so DMA decided to cancel the project and focus their efforts on other, more successful games (such as Lemmings).

A playable demo of Cutie Poo was shown at the European Computer Entertainment Show London in September / October 1990, along with other DMA demos such as Walker and Gore (another cancelled Amiga action game), so we can still hope that one day someone could find this demo and share it with the world.

The game had a quite negative feedback from the press and that could be one of the reasons of its cancellation:

“Just when you thought the interactive movie was dead.. along comes Sacred Pools. This is another Segasoft venture, and one which they say revolutionises adventure gaming by mixing computer graphics with video footage. At present only the video footage was on show, and it’s the usual mix of Dr. Who effects and actors without dignity. And we thought they’d learned their lesson with Double Switch.”

As far as we know, Sacred Pools was meant to be one of the first adult-only titles for the Sega Saturn, in the form of “erotic thriller” with explicit (?) sex and violent scenes, but we don’t know exactly what the team wanted to shown in the game. Sacred Pools was just one of many unreleased games planned by Segasoft, such as G.I. Ant, Heat Warz, Ragged Earth and Skies.

A few more details were shared in the Assembler Games Forum by an anonymous user who seems to own a playable beta of the game:

“SEGASOFT paid over $3mil to develop the game. The company is called Codemonkeys now. Not sure if they had a different name back then. But Segasoft pretty much entirely funded the company during that period. […] My knowledge is limited. They spent a bunch of money developing this game that was supposed to be “revolutionary”. The game missed milestones and went way over budget. I have never played that far through the game but what i’ve seen is that it is basically a FMV game where you can sort of move around the world. You have choices of which direction to go and what to do, but they are limited and (obviously) on tracks.”

If you have more images or details about this lost game, let us know! We hope to be able to preserve some footage from the game in the future.

As reported by IGN in late 1999 Dutch publisher Project 2 Interactive gained the license to publish new Dreamcast games, announcing the never released Knights and another project under the name “Big Bang”, later released as Bang! Gunship Elite in December 2000. In another interesting article by Control Online (in Dutch) we can read that in March 2000 issue of PC Zone magazine (No. 30, Dutch version) they published a good preview of Knights, revealing more details about the game’s humorous backstory:

“In the magical kingdom of Whyrule the king is too old to keep ruling the country. To find a new king they decide to organize a big tournament among knights and the winner will then rule the kingdom. You’re ready for a career change, so put on your best mail-coat out of the closet and departure towards the castle.”

Initially Knights was started as a classic 3D platform adventure similar to Mario 64 and Spyro the Dragon, but soon the team had to switch plans when it became clear they would not have enough time, experience and resources to develop such kind of game. Digital Infinity were still a young team, with inexperienced developers and designers, who had to create their own 3D engine and assets without having a proper design doc to follow. After the platform game concept was tossed away they were able to create an early multiplayer demo, taking inspiration from the online capabilities of the Dreamcast and the increasing popularity of online gaming on PC.

This version of Knights was meant to be some kind of team-based multiplayer brawler with many interesting mechanics: levels were composed of different flying islands interconnected by slides, where players could move around and fight against the opposite team using different knights with different abilities, while also playing with the environment to their advantages, for example by riding a water-scooter in a small lake in one of the islands. By looking at the few screenshots we were able to gather, it seems that Knights could have been a fun multiplayer experience on the Dreamcast, with many interesting ideas.

“Their first title, Knights (so close..) is an online deathmatch title of sorts, with an interesting twist. It is more of an interactive game of “kill the man with the ball,” and will also allow players to build their own DM levels. Project 2 plans on launching the title some time next year, and including online components a plenty.”

Unfortunately development was proceeding slowly and in the meantime Project 2 Interactiveclosed down for bankruptcy: even if the first couple of milestones were delivered, without Project 2 Digital Infinity regain the Knights rights and tried to find a new publisher.

With some luck they were able to gather Swing! Entertainment’s interest, a new publisher that doubled the studio budget and wanted to release Knights on more platforms, such as the Playstation 2. Meanwhile Digital Infinity also became part of Lost Boys Games, the studio grown with more developers, designers and artists. After the Dreamcast failed to sell enough units and with Sega discontinuing the console on March 2001, the team decided to finally cancel the Dreamcast version of Knights, focusing on the PS2 version and reworking the game again to make it the 3D platform-adventure they initially wanted to do. In the end the Playstation 2 version of Knights was also canned when Lost Boys Games were sold to Media Republic and renamed Guerrilla Games, starting to work on their Killzone series for Sony and Shellshock: Nam ’67 for PS2, Xbox, and PC. A Game Boy Color version of Knights was also under development by Formula Games / Lost Boys, but as it happened for the 3D version the game was never released.

We tried to get in contact with former former Digital Infinity / Lost Boys developers, in an attempt to unearth more on Knights, but unfortunately, they were not available for comment. If you know someone that worked on Knights, please let us know!

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